The infant Jesus suckles at Mary’s breast while Joseph sleeps soundly in this 1625 depiction of the rest on the flight into Egypt by the Italian painter Orazio Gentileschi.
Warned by an angel in a dream that Herod planned to find and kill Jesus, Joseph took his wife and child to Egypt, where they remained until the king had died, according to Matthew 2:13–15. The gospel writer doesn’t give any details of their journey, but later Christians filled in the gaps with miracle stories about the Holy Family’s trials and triumphs during their sojourn. An eighth- or ninth-century apocryphal text (known as the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew) mentions a siesta:
And it came to pass on the third day of their journey, while they were walking, that Mary was fatigued by the excessive heat of the sun in the desert; and, seeing a palm-tree, she said to Joseph, “I should like to rest a little in the shade of this tree.”
This scene became a popular subject in Christian art. Images frequently depict the shading palm tree miraculously bending down to let the famished Virgin pick its fruit (as the apocryphal tale later describes). But Gentileschi, who painted the subject several times, preferred to omit the miraculous elements in favor of the basic human story—a journeying family taking a much-needed rest. Here he replaces the tree with a more prosaic ruined wall, behind which the family’s donkey relaxes serenely.
And in Gentileschi’s interpretation it appears to be the aged Joseph, not his young wife, who is the more fatigued. The long artistic tradition of picturing Joseph as an older man is based on another apocryphal text, the Protevangelium (or Infancy Gospel) of James, which describes Joseph as a widower and Mary as his second wife.
Although mostly ignored by the Western church today, the flight into Egypt remains central in the Egyptian Coptic church, which prides itself on its country’s legacy as a refuge to the Holy Family.
The infant Jesus suckles at Mary’s breast while Joseph sleeps soundly in this 1625 depiction of the rest on the flight into Egypt by the Italian painter Orazio Gentileschi.
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